Hate

I Hate Eugene

Eugene is a town whose best days are behind it.

The hippies, they say, landed in the area for a Grateful Dead show sometime in the 1960s and stayed on, as the apocryphal tale goes, because they were too stoned to find the bus station; this was the inciting incident for the myriad political demonstrations, school shootings, meth vans and organic food stores that have checkered this town's journey up to the present. What was once a modest settlement founded by pioneer Eugene Skinner in 1846 is now an overgrown college town of dubious repute, and a stupid, ugly, hateful one at that. Whether measured in economic or cultural terms, Eugene should have been put out of its misery decades ago.

Eugene is a town that treats its only claim to fame, the University of Oregon, like an embarrassment. All that the UO really has going for it is a fairly successful football program and maybe a couple of second-tier graduate programs. Ducks football may well be more important to the Eugene community than the Trail Blazers are to Portland, but apart from this and a few hundred low-paying jobs, the town regards the UO as an encumbrance. Every year or so, the city council tightens another screw on the well-oiled cash machine of MIP fines and noise disturbances, designed to squeeze city government-sustaining money out of those who can least afford it: college students. Most students are not Eugene natives, and as trespassers from other towns, other states, and even other countries, there is no hesitation on the city's part to treat us like we're not wanted. UO students are outsiders, interlopers, and yet we are also the sole reason this town is ever mentioned outside the city limits.

The best of anything to emerge from Eugene has invariably done so from the University. Nike cofounder Phil Knight was a 1959 graduate; Steve Prefontaine broke world records in track and field; the filmed-on-campus National Lampoon's Animal House made a collegiate hero out of John Belushi; and Bobby Moore-cum-Ahmad Rashad ran for 1156 yards for the Vikings in 1979.

Flash forward twenty years: Knight has disowned his hostile alma mater; Prefontaine blew it first at the Olympics and then against a rock up by Hendricks Park; Belushi has long snorted his last line; and Rashad is stuck doing NBA Inside Stuff for an audience of twelve-year-olds. It's all been downhill since Tom Wolfe's Me Decade, and it isn't getting better. Recent UO grads include a handful of adequate NFL players and Chuck Palahniuk, whose novels make better movies (Fight Club) than they do novels.

Now remove the University from the picture, and Eugene becomes all the more pathetic. Downtown Eugene is, to the best of my estimation, approximately three square blocks. The buildings rarely eclipse eight stories - Prince Lucien Campbell may as well be the tallest building in town, and skinny as it is, I'll be damned if it doesn't fall right over on top of the Knight Library when the Big One hits.

The main attractions are the downtown street mall on Broadway - that is, if street kids are your thing- and the LTD Eugene Station at 11th and Willamette - a good place to find not just street kids, but also runaways, mental patients, hippies and the rest of the assorted degenerates which make this town so colorful.

Portland and other nearby cities may be larger and thus have a larger population of crazy people, but they just aren't as bizarre or as visible as the crazy people Eugene has to offer. When "Zeus," a middle-aged acid casualty best known for his diet of Barbie doll heads died in the fall of 1998, it made the cover of the Register-Guard.

The crazies are Eugene's only distinguished citizens; the movers and shakers of this town couldn't get a Burger King built in anywhere else - there's a reason they've been relegated to Lane County. The same goes for the local television personalities. No matter that they're funnier-looking than the news anchors in other markets, they're also more prone to stumbling over their lines. Either they tried to move up and failed, or they've already failed in larger markets and come here. Eugene, no stranger to failure, welcomes them with open arms. In short, Eugene is somewhere between a small town straining to grow and a moderately-sized city sliding into dilapidation.

Of course, this polemic could only get so far without bringing up Springfield, a town whose sole non-parricidal claim to fame is Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, and he hasn't written anything worthwhile since about 1964. Rumor has it that members of Quiet Riot live in the area, if that says anything.

In Springfield, every store is named Chuck's Tavern or Rod's Auto Glass or Dale's Pawn Shop, and it's probably owned by an alcoholic who's sexually abusing his heroin addict daughter. (Tom's Tapper is the only notable exception to this rule.) Five minutes inside Springfield's Gateway Mall should provide you with enough painful images of tattoos and tank tops on ex-cons, six pounds of makeup and halter tops on high school sluts, 300 pound pregnant mothers dressed entirely in denim, and out-of-work auto mechanics looking to score some blow and a taco to last you the rest of your life. You've been warned.

Springfield is as miserable as it gets, akin to the decimated Flint, Michigan of Roger & Me. But then, this economic disaster is the fault of the tree-hugging contingent and not "corporate control"; getting Michael Moore to point his camera this way would be a laughable endeavor. Springfield, however, is known across the rest of the English-speaking North American continent as the home of Kip Kinkel, the monster-in-tennis-shoes/misunderstood adolescent responsible for the shootings at Thurston High School. Isn't that something to be proud of? Lane County's most notorious prodigal son is all that separates Springfield from the innumerable impoverished burgs that surround Eugene (Junction City, Creswell, Coburg, Pleasant Hill, Goshen, ad nauseum).

Granted, it was a terrible tragedy that touched many lives and destroyed more than a few, the end result being a rather graphic documentary assembled by PBS's Frontline and a Rolling Stone two-part special. (Ken Kesey's accompanying ramblings about "banning the bullet" only underscored his waning talent.) The Eugene-Springfield area was finally getting the recognition it deserved - for a time.

It didn't take but a year for poor Springfield to be upstaged by a more ambitious, more deadly, and better-covered high school massacre. A week before the first anniversary of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' malevolent field day, President Clinton paid a visit to Littleton in support of both the community and an impending gun control initiative. Where was he on the 21st of May last year? Not in Springfield. (Then again, at that time he was busy getting impeached, and Oregon isn't as spineless as Colorado when it comes to scapegoating gun owners for the actions of underage psychos.)

Springfield doesn't rate anymore - it's just another dilapidated trailer park somewhere between Portland and San Francisco.

Lane County's other recent claim to international fame stems from the havoc wreaked at the Seattle WTO conference by Eugene-based anarchists. John Zerzan, the closest thing to an intellectual leader the local radical left can speak of, was interviewed for 60 Minutes. Spin and Rolling Stone each mounted competing exposes of the Eugene anarchist movement, and other national media outlets made their pilgrimage to the area hoping for that single, elusive glimpse of a high-school dropout in a hooded sweatshirt. In the end, Seattle got ransacked, and Eugene got the blame.

The history of Eugene and its ugly sister Springfield has been one long, futile war between the rednecks at one end of the political continuum, and the anarchists at the other. More often than not, trees can be found at the center of this epic struggle. Rednecks typically lose fights with quasi-religious environmentalists over the fate of their logging jobs; anarchists typically lose fights with the city council over the fate of fifteen-year-old trees in downtown Eugene. Neither side has ever managed to score anything in the way of a meaningful victory, and don't expect one anytime soon.

Rednecks aren't too particular about what you call them, so long as you have an Old Milwaukee's to share, but Eugene's assorted left is not so forgiving. Any attempt to generalize about their behaviors or political leanings is sure to draw fire. Many of them don't like to be called anarchists. So what do you consider yourself? A mere democrat? A social democrat? A socialist? A Chomskyite libertarian socialist? A vegan? Communism is out of vogue, but the spirit, unfortunately, lives on.

No matter how long this catalogue of disconcerting facts about Eugene continues, it is impossible to accurately summarize the truly abysmal state of the town. This is by no means a definitive account of Eugene's civil atrocities, and there probably is no such thing. So be it. To summarize: I hate Eugene, I rue the day I set foot in this town, and the moment I graduate, I will never, ever, ever come back. Except for the football games.

William Beutler, a junior majoring in English and Journalism is Editor-in-Chief for the Oregon Commentator